Upon reaching Syria and discovering that Aleppo was now closed to him, Bursuq followed the example of Maudud of Mosul in 1111 and sought support from Shaizar for an attack on Antioch’s southern frontier. Roger, meanwhile, responded in kind by marching 2,000 troops to a holding position at Apamea, probably in the company of Baldwin II of Edessa. There the extraordinary pan-Levantine alliance assembled. Tughtegin, true to his word, joined Roger with some 10,000 men, while Baldwin I and Pons of Tripoli arrived later in August. These arrayed forces, so often themselves combatants, held their ground throughout the summer, successfully intermingling Latin and Muslim troops without apparent difficulty.
Facing such a sizeable and entrenched opposing force, Bursuq did his best to provoke open battle, sending skirmishers to harass the allied camp and leading raids into the Summaq plateau. It is testament to the difficulty of maintaining discipline in the face of such provocation that Roger threatened to blind anyone breaking ranks. The Latins, alongside their Damascene fellows, duly held to their position. Thwarted, Bursuq retreated from Shaizar and, with the danger to Syria now apparently passed, the grand coalition broke up.
Roger returned to Antioch, but in the first days of September Bursuq’s withdrawal was revealed as a ruse. Having fallen back towards Hama to await the dissolution of the defending army, he now circled around, cutting a swathe through the northern reaches of the Summaq. With the principality in real danger of being overrun, Roger found himself in an unsettling predicament, isolated from his allies. Only Baldwin of Edessa remained, having held troops in the principality throughout the summer as something akin to a client ruler of Antioch. Should Roger dutifully await the reassembly of the Latin–Muslim coalition, leaving Bursuq to roam the Syrian countryside with impunity, or risk swift, independent action? In essence, his dilemma replicated that faced by Baldwin I two years earlier and, in spite of the evident lessons of that encounter, on 12 September 1115 the prince of Antioch gathered his army at Rugia and marched to intercept the enemy. This was a rather foolhardy act of bravado. Leading some 500 to 700 knights and perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 infantry, he stood to be outnumbered by at least two to one. The Latins seem to have put their faith in an Antiochene relic of the True Cross carried in their midst by the bishop of Jabala and to have undertaken a series of purifying spiritual rites, but even so Roger must have recognised that he was gambling the future of Frankish Syria.
On this occasion it was the Christians who enjoyed the benefit of fortune and the sharper edge of military intelligence. Moving through the Ruj valley, Roger camped at Hab, all the while searching for signs of Bursuq’s army. On the morning of 14 September scouts brought news: the enemy was camped nearby in the valley of Sarmin, unaware of their approach. Roger launched a surprise attack, panicking the Muslims into a chaotic retreat on to the flanks of a nearby hill known as Tell Danith, where they were soon overrun. With Bursuq in full flight, Roger savoured a famous victory. So plentiful was the loot plundered from the captured Muslim camp that the triumphant prince needed three days to distribute it among his men. Roger had broken the rules of engagement and won; but in doing so he had set a worrying precedent for hot-headed impetuosity.73
Baldwin of Boulogne’s last years
King Baldwin I reaffirmed his own propensity for audacious, even visionary, exploits later that same autumn. East, beyond the banks of the River Jordan and between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea, lay an arid, inhospitable and largely unpopulated region. Today it roughly conforms to the modern borders of Jordan; in the twelfth century it became known as Transjordan. Desolate as it might have been, it acted as an essential channel for trade and communication between Syria and the cities of Egypt and Arabia. Baldwin had already ventured into the area in 1107 and again in 1113 on limited, exploratory campaigns. Now, towards the end of 1115, he made a bold attempt to initiate Frankish colonisation of the area as a first step towards controlling trans-Levantine traffic. Marching with just 200 knights and 400 infantry to a tell-like outcrop known locally as Shobak, he constructed a makeshift castle christened Montreal, or the Royal Mountain. He then returned to the region the following year to establish the small outpost on the Red Sea coast at Aqaba. By these steps Baldwin began a process of territorial expansion that would benefit the kingdom in years to come.
After a severe bout of infirmity in winter 1116–17, Baldwin spent months convalescing, but by the start of 1118 he was ready to contemplate new military endeavours. That March he mounted an ambitious raiding campaign into Egypt, reaching the eastern branches of the Nile. In the midst of success, he suddenly fell desperately ill; the old wound received in 1103, from which he had never fully recovered, had now reopened. Deep in enemy territory, the great king found himself in such terrible pain that he was unable to ride a horse, and so, borne upon an improvised litter, he began a tortured journey back towards Palestine. A few days later, on 2 April 1118, he reached the tiny frontier settlement of al-Arish, but could go no further and there, having confessed his sins, he died.
The king had been determined that his body not be left in Egypt and so, after his death, his careful, if rather gruesome, instructions to his cook Addo were precisely followed in order to prevent his corpse rotting in the heat.
Just as he had resolutely asked, his belly was cut [open], his internal organs were taken out and buried, his body was salted inside and out, in the eyes, mouth, nostrils and ears [and] also embalmed with spices and balsam, then it was sewn into a hide and wrapped in carpets, placed on horseback and firmly tied on.
The funeral party bearing his remains reached Jerusalem that Palm Sunday and, in accordance with his last wishes, King Baldwin I was buried in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, beside his brother Godfrey of Bouillon.74
Although the First Crusaders prosecuted the initial invasion of the Levant, the real task of conquering the Near East and creating the crusader states was carried out by the first generation of settlers in Outremer. Of these, the greatest individual contributions were undoubtedly made by King Baldwin I and his rival Tancred of Antioch. Together these two rulers steered the Latin East through a period of extreme fragility, during which the myth of Frankish invincibility in battle cracked and the first intermittent signs of a Muslim counter-offensive surfaced. Between 1100 and 1118, perhaps even more than during the First Crusade, the real significance of Islamic disunity became clear, for in these years of foundation the western European settlement of Syria and Palestine quite probably could have been halted by committed and concerted Muslim attack.
The Crusader States in the Early Twelfth Century
Baldwin’s and Tancred’s successes were built upon a flexibility of approach that mixed ruthlessness with pragmatism. Thus the work of consolidation and subjugation was carried out not simply through direct military conquest, but also via diplomacy, financial exploitation and the incorporation of the indigenous non-Latin population within the fabric of the Frankish states. Latin survival likewise was dependent upon the willingness of Baldwin, Tancred and their contemporaries to temper internecine competition and confrontation with cooperation in the face of external threats. There were some echoes of ‘crusading’ ideology in the struggle to defend the Holy Land, not least in the use of ritual purification before battle and the rise of the cult of the True Cross. But at the same time, early Latin settlers demonstrated a clear willingness to integrate into the world of the Near East, pursuing trading pacts, limited-term truces and even cooperative military alliances with their Muslim neighbours. Of course, this variety of approach simply mirrored and extended the reality of holy war witnessed during the First Crusade. The Franks continued to be capable of personifying Muslims, and even Greeks, as avowed enemies, while at a broader level still interacting with the indigenous peoples of the Levant according to the normalised customs of Frankish society.
5
OUTREMER
Just before first light on 28 June 1119 Prince Roger of Antioch gathered his army in readiness for battle. His men huddled together to listen
to a sermon, partake of mass and venerate the Antiochene relic of the True Cross–girding their souls for the fight ahead. In the days leading up to this moment, Roger had reacted with decisive resolution to news of an impending Muslim invasion. After years of passively enduring Antiochene expansionism and repeated demands for exorbitant tribute, Aleppo had suddenly moved on to the offensive. Mustering a force–perhaps in excess of 10,000 men–the city’s new emir, the Artuqid Turk Il-ghazi, marched on the border zone with Frankish Antioch. Facing this threat, Roger could have waited for reinforcements from his Latin neighbours, including Baldwin of Bourcq (who had assumed the Jerusalemite crown in 1118). Instead, the prince assembled around 700 knights, 3,000 infantry and a corps of Turcopoles (Christianised mercenaries of Turkish birth) and crossed to the eastern flanks of the Belus Hills. Roger camped in a valley near the small settlement of Sarmada–which he believed was well defended by enclosing rocky hills–and that morning was about to initiate a swift advance, hoping to catch his enemy unawares and replay his success of 1115. Unbeknownst to the prince, however, on the preceding evening scouts had revealed the Christians’ position to Il-ghazi. Drawing upon local knowledge of the surrounding terrain, the Artuqid commander dispatched troops to approach Roger’s camp from three different directions and, as one Arabic chronicler attested, ‘as dawn broke [the Franks] saw the Muslim standards advancing to surround them completely’.75
THE FIELD OF BLOOD
With bugles sounding an urgent call to arms through the ranks, Roger rushed to organise his forces for combat, a cleric bearing the True Cross beside him. As Il-ghazi’s men closed in, there was just time to assemble the Latin host beyond the confines of the camp. In the vain hope of regaining the initiative, Roger ordered the Frankish knights on his right flank to deliver a crushing heavy charge and, at first, they appeared to have stemmed the Aleppan advance. But as battle was joined along the line, a contingent of Turcopoles stationed on the left wing buckled, and their rout splintered the Latin formation. Outnumbered and encircled, the Antiochenes were gradually overrun.
Caught at the heart of the maelstrom, Prince Roger was left horribly exposed, but ‘though his men lay cut down and dead on all sides…he never retreated, nor looked back’. One Latin eyewitness described how, ‘fighting energetically…[the prince] was struck by a [Muslim] sword through the middle of his nose right into his brain, and settling his debt to death [beneath] the Holy Cross he gave up his body to the earth and his soul to heaven’. The unfortunate priest carrying the True Cross was likewise cut down, although it was later said that the relic exacted its own miraculous revenge for this killing, causing all the Muslims nearby to suddenly become ‘possessed by greed’ for its ‘gold and precious stones’ and thus to begin butchering one another.
As resistance collapsed, a few Franks escaped westwards into the Belus Hills, but most were slaughtered. A Muslim living in Damascus described it as ‘one of [Islam’s] finest victories’, noting that, strewn across the battleground, the enemy’s slain horses resembled hedgehogs ‘because of the quantity of arrows sticking into them’. So terrible was this defeat, so great the number of Christian dead, that the Antiochenes thereafter dubbed the site ‘Ager Sanguinis’, the Field of Blood.
The Latin principality, stripped of its ruler and army, stood open to further assault. Il-ghazi, nonetheless, made no real attempt to conquer Antioch itself. Traditionally, he has been criticised broadly for not seizing an ideal opportunity to capture the Frankish capital. Yet, in truth, Antioch was weakened, but far from helpless. Its extraordinarily formidable fortifications meant that, even with limited manpower to hand, the city could resist conquest by an external enemy. Il-ghazi possessed neither the time to prosecute a grinding siege, nor the men to garrison the city should it fall. Aware that Frankish reinforcements from the south would likely arrive within weeks, and with Aleppan strategic interests foremost in his mind, Il-ghazi chose instead to focus upon the Jazr border zone east of the Belus range, retaking al-Atharib and Zardana. By early August he had reoccupied this buffer zone, safeguarding Aleppo’s survival as a Muslim power.
In the meantime, Latin armies from Jerusalem and Tripoli reached Antioch, and King Baldwin II prepared for a counter-strike. Rallying the remnants of the principality’s fighting manpower, he confronted Il-ghazi on 14 August 1119 in an inconclusive battle near Zardana. The Muslim army, recently bolstered by Damascene troops, was driven from the field, and, with momentum faltering, Il-ghazi drew his campaign to a close. Christian losses were high and among those captured was Robert fitz-Fulk the Leper, lord of Zardana. Brought to Damascus, he might have hoped for clemency from his friend and former ally Tughtegin, but when Robert refused to renounce his religion, the atabeg flew into a rage and beheaded him ‘by a stroke of his sword’. Rumour had it that Tughtegin had Robert’s skull fashioned into a gaudy, gold-plated, jewel-encrusted goblet.76
King Baldwin II’s arrival in northern Syria secured the Frankish principality’s immediate survival, but Outremer as a whole now had to confront the Field of Blood’s terrible aftermath. The territorial losses were grave–beyond Il-ghazi’s conquests, Muslim Shaizar exploited Christian weakness to overrun all of the Summaq plateau, barring the outpost at Apamea–but Antioch had recovered from an even bleaker position after the defeat at Harran in 1104. The true significance of 1119 lay in the prince’s death. Never before had an incumbent Latin ruler fallen in battle and, worse still, Roger died childless, leaving Antioch prone to a crippling succession crisis. With few options available, Baldwin stepped into the breach. The claim of Bohemond of Taranto’s nine-year-old son and namesake, Bohemond II, then living in Italy, was resurrected, with the king agreeing to act as regent until the young prince-designate reached his majority at the age of fifteen.
In a wider sense, the Field of Blood was a deeply unsettling shock for Latin Christendom. This was not the first Frankish reversal. In the afterglow of the ‘miraculous’ First Crusade, earlier setbacks had already cast their shadow: the collapse of the 1101 Crusade; Baldwin I’s defeat in the second Battle of Ramla; the mauling at Harran. But in the wake of 1119–the ‘sorrow of sorrows’, which ‘took away joy and went beyond the bounds and measure of all misery’–a troubling question that cut to the heart of the belief system that underpinned crusading and the settlement of Outremer was unavoidable. If holy war truly was the work of God, sanctioned and empowered by His divine will, then how could defeat be explained? The answer was sin–success for Islam in the war for dominion of the Levant was a punishment, mandated in Heaven, for Christian transgression. The sinner, or scapegoat, at the Field of Blood was deemed to be Prince Roger, now branded as an adulterer and a usurper. In the future, the notion of sin as a cause of defeat would gain ever wider currency, and other individuals and groups would be targeted to explain the vagaries of war.77
COUNTERING MISFORTUNE
In one sense, the alarm caused by the Field of Blood proved to be unfounded. The threat posed by Aleppo soon abated and Il-ghazi died in 1122 without scoring another telling victory against the Franks. Over the next two decades Near Eastern Islam remained disunited, mired in internal power struggles–and thus little concerted thought was given to waging jihad against Outremer. Indeed, the Latins made a number of significant conquests in this period. Baldwin II recouped Antioch’s losses in the Summaq and east of the Belus Hills. A foothold in another strategically sensitive border zone–this time between Jerusalem and Damascus–was secured when the Franks occupied the fortified town of Banyas, situated to the east of the River Jordan’s headwaters, standing guard over the Terre de Sueth. In 1142 the Jerusalemite crown also supported the construction of a major new castle in Transjordan. This fortress, Kerak, perched upon a narrow ridge amid the Jordanian desert, grew to become one of the great ‘crusader’ strongholds of the Levant and was designated as the region’s administrative centre.
Nonetheless, the crusader states were plagued by instability in the years that followed the Field of Blood. This was born
largely of misfortune rather than entrenched Muslim aggression, as captivity and untimely death robbed the Latins of a series of leaders, igniting succession crises and engendering civil strife. Taken prisoner during a chance Muslim attack in April 1123, King Baldwin II spent sixteen months in captivity before being ransomed, during which time a coup in Palestine was narrowly avoided. Bohemond II arrived in 1126 to assume control of Antioch and was married to Baldwin II’s daughter Alice, but the young prince was slain during a raid into Cilicia just four years later, leaving behind an infant girl, Constance, as heir. Alice spent the early 1130s intriguing to seize power in the principality. Baldwin II’s own death from illness in 1131, closely followed by the demise of his ally and successor as count of Edessa, Joscelin of Courtenay, also eradicated the last vestiges of Outremer’s old guard. Against this background of incipient weakness, the need for an injection of strength and support became ever more pressing.78
The Military Orders
The emergence of two religious orders combining the ideals of knighthood and monasticism played a vital role in buttressing the Frankish Levant. In about 1119, a small band of knights, led by a French nobleman named Hugh of Payns, dedicated themselves to the charitable task of protecting Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. In practical terms, at first this meant patrolling the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem, but Hugh’s group quickly gained wider recognition and patronage. The Latin patriarch soon acknowledged their status as a spiritual order, while the king himself gave them quarters in Jerusalem’s Aqsa mosque, known to the Franks as the Temple of Solomon, and from this site they gained their name: the Order of the Temple of Solomon, or the Templars. Like monks, they made vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, but, rather than dedicate themselves to lives of sheltered devotion in isolated communities, they took up sword, shield and armour to fight for Christendom and the defence of the Holy Land.
The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land Page 17
